With Malice. Rachel Lee

about Stacy?” Grant’s voice broke on the name.

      “She was dead, Grant. What the hell difference does it make, as long as your chances for the presidency, and S.R. 52, don’t get derailed? Dead is dead.”

      Grant didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak. “Jerry, tampering—”

      “Don’t say that word. I’m a lawyer. I know the situation. What I don’t want is for you to know it, so will you just stop badgering me? For all you know, I heard of Stacy’s death elsewhere.”

      Grant hesitated, looking down at the pebble path, at the gleam of his polished shoes, thinking he’d been wearing this suit for two straight days and he was probably beginning to stink. Thinking about irrelevancies in order to avoid the bigger issues.

      “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I just want to tell that detective everything.”

      “Everything? What? Just what is the everything you think you know? Believe me, Grant, you don’t know, so just shut up about it.”

      Jerry rarely talked to him that way. It was a sign of his distress, and Grant recognized it. He looked at his friend, taking in the tightness of Jerry’s face, the sagging of his mouth, the wariness of his eyes.

      “All right,” he said finally. His heart was heavy with it, but he knew it was time for compromise. Politics had taught him that there was very little room in the world for sheer altruism. One hand washed the other. Compromises were the means of achievement, and some things were better left unsaid.

      Whatever Jerry had done, Grant had to keep his mouth shut about it. He had to protect his friend; he had to protect himself and his children. He had to protect his shot at the presidency.

      There was too much at stake here to indulge in an orgy of soul-baring that wouldn’t help a damn thing. It certainly wouldn’t bring Abby or Stacy back.

      “You’re safe with me,” he told Jerry.

      Jerry’s hollow eyes looked back at him. “I hope you know you’re safe with me, too.”

      Grant nodded, but given what had happened overnight, given that there was now a secret between them that he could only guess at, he wasn’t as sure of that as he might have been only yesterday.

      Shortly after Jerry left, Randall Youngblood called. The call might have gone unanswered except that the weekly maid was there and picked it up.

      Grant took the call in his parents’ study, sitting in the deep leather chair that over the years had become contoured to his father’s body. “Hello?” he said.

      “Grant.” The use of his first name was a signal that this was to be a personal conversation. Grant relaxed a shade. He was not up to a political discussion right now. “I’m sorry,” Youngblood continued. “I heard the news a little while ago. I am so sorry.”

      Grant had to swallow before he could answer. It surprised him how painful an expression of sympathy could feel. “Thanks.”

      “I just want you to know…well, I’m laying off for a week, okay? I won’t lobby until you get back in the saddle.”

      “That’s very good of you.” And only slightly surprising. In this game, nobody burned bridges lightly, because you never knew when you might become allies. He and Randall Youngblood were opponents right now, but there had been times when they’d been allies, and there would be again.

      “It seems like the right thing to do,” Youngblood said. “You’ve got enough to deal with right now. Just let me know if I can do anything.”

      “Thank you. I will.”

      But after he hung up, Grant sat a while, thinking about how important blocking this bill was to Youngblood and his cohorts. And wondering what Youngblood would be doing during this hiatus on public lobbying.

      Because he knew Youngblood and company weren’t going to halt completely.

      As Cathy Suzanne would say, “No way, Jose.”

      5

      Randall Youngblood was rarely an impatient man. He’d been in agribusiness, and on the cane growers’ association board, too long to have remained impatient. All things developed in their own damn time, and pushing and pulling rarely accomplished anything.

      But this day he was impatient. He smelled blood. The question was whether it was his blood, his and the rest of the cane growers, or whether it was Grant Lawrence’s blood. He knew which way he needed to tip the scales, but waiting for Bill Michaels to come back to him was proving very difficult.

      Standing at his window in the penthouse office of a tall building in Miami, he looked out toward the Glades and considered his situation. The simple fact was, the death of Abby Reese, a figure who was known to the public to be well-loved by Grant Lawrence, was going to create a firestorm of sympathy for the senator. Hell, he felt an aching sympathy himself. But that sympathy had to be stemmed somehow, or S.R. 52 might sail through the Senate and House as an act of political compassion. Even if it was enough to tip the scales just a little bit more toward Grant, it could wind up being a done deal.

      As a cane grower, Randall Youngblood knew very well how too many environmental restrictions were going to kill both his business and much of the most important business of south Florida. Depriving the growers of their right to use fertilizers and insecticides, demanding that large areas of the river of grass, now dry, be gradually returned to their previously flooded state, thus wiping out massive acreage now in production, would be an economic disaster.

      Because if the Florida growers couldn’t keep their prices down, foreign supplies of cane sugar would become the cheaper alternative.

      It wasn’t that Randall Youngblood didn’t care about the coral reefs along the Keys, or the state of the water and fisheries out there. He did care. But he also cared that he and his colleagues not be wiped out in a headlong rush to undo eighty years of draining, reclaiming and planting.

      S.R. 52 would cause reclamation to happen far too fast. It would wipe out lives and livelihoods beyond anything he figured Grant Lawrence had even imagined. Things like this needed to be taken very, very slowly. And Lawrence didn’t seem to understand that.

      The senator didn’t understand the economic ripple effect that would occur when, lacking fertilizers and pesticides, per-acre yields plummeted and the layoffs began. The ripples that would run through other south Florida businesses, sinking them when they had no customers. Then it would spread out in ever-widening waves, because the businesses that would fail in south Florida would no longer be buying supplies from businesses elsewhere. Randall Youngblood could see that as clearly as he could see his hand before his face. And because S.R. 52 covered all of agriculture, the disaster that would stem from south Florida was only a small part of the overall picture.

      Then there was the truly major issue of America’s position as a beacon of hope in an ever-hungrier world.

      It wasn’t too much of a stretch to say that the Soviet Union had been brought down by the Randall Youngbloods of the United States. People who lived in perpetual near-famine looked with envy upon the opulence of American life, and nowhere was that opulence more apparent than in the ordinary supermarket. Fresh vegetables, meats, breads, all manner of foods, readily available, at affordable prices, on any given day.

      And that was, in large part, a function of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Lawrence might not see it, but the birthday cake he would have at his daughter’s party was a byproduct of the very industries his legislation was trying to undermine. And Randall, for one, did not want to pay ten dollars a pound for sugar, or five dollars a pound for tomatoes. That was the alternative S.R. 52 would make inevitable.

      The simple fact was that Americans liked to live above their means, and the agriculture industry helped to make that possible by producing a comparative abundance of food. Yes, the cost of that was being passed on to future generations, in the form of environmental changes that would have to be dealt with. Grant Lawrence and others seemed